


A Matter of Efficiencies

by BlueMinuet



Series: Liminal Space Extended Universe [1]
Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Blood and Injury, Dubcon Mind Control, Gun Violence, M/M, Medical Procedures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 20:42:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17567630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMinuet/pseuds/BlueMinuet
Summary: When Kaidou gets hurt on a job, it’s up to Inui to save him.





	A Matter of Efficiencies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yrindor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yrindor/gifts).



> This is vaguely part of the same universe as [Liminal Space](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6413182), but it is not necessary to read one to understand the other. Since large swatches of the AU are not AO3 (yet?) so here's a brief rundown: 
> 
> Cyberpunk AU. The 'tenipuri' generation (Inui and Kaidou) are the earlier generation, where the technology that makes the universe run is still developing. The 'yowapeda' generation (Kinjou and Makishima) takes place after, when the technology is more in place and established. (Also, Kaidou and Inui are Kinjou's parents.) 
> 
> 'Spider' is the term for the super advanced hackers that plug their minds into networks (Inui, in this case), 'spider busters' are assassins whose lack of tech and body modifications make them able to take on these hackers (Kaidou, in this case).

Kaidou swung around as best he could, aiming for the oncoming footsteps about to round the corner, still clutching at his abdomen. He’d taken a bullet while infiltrating the enemy compound, and though he’d managed to get as far away as he could, he wasn’t sure his strength would hold up for another fight. Worse still, Inui had gone silent. He wasn’t sure if they had found him as well, in his secluded spot outside the compound. If they had, there was no chance of him getting out… 

A gaunt looking man rounded the corner, with dark yet ashen skin and eyes covered with a glowing blue visor. Kaidou recognized a spider when he saw one, but given that this wasn’t _his_ spider, he cocked his gun. 

“Whoa,” the man said, holding his hands up in surrender. “It’s me.”

Kaidou narrowed his eyes. 

The man sighed. “If you kill this one, I’ll have to find another spider or drone to puppet, and I’d really rather not.”

Kaidou lowered his pistol. “Inui…”

The man nodded, kneeling next to him. “This was the only way I could get to you. They disabled most of their drones, so I had to take command of the house spider’s body.”

“Doesn’t that generally have to be consensual?” Kaidou asked. 

“Generally,” Inui muttered. “Callsign Sobek here is a bit of a fanboy…”

“Lovely,” Kaidou said with a grimace as Inui poked at his wound with puppeted hands. 

“Well, I’m blocking him from recording new memories, regardless,” Inui said. “Can you move?” 

Kaidou nodded. “I think so.”

The spider’s face managed to look concerned at that, but he pulled Kaidou to sling his arm over his shoulder to help him out. “I’ve already secured a vehicle outside, and plotted the most likely route to avoid detection.”

“I hope it’s deserted, because I’m pretty sure I can’t handle another fight.”

Inui said nothing to that. “The real question is where we go after.”

“Safehouse,” Kaidou muttered. 

“I believe your safehouse is too far away…”

“Different safehouse.”

Inui stared at him. “How many do you have?”

Kaidou gripped his hand. “Questions later.”

Inui nodded, and obliged.  
  


* * *

  
Inui was sitting atop the roof of a jeep when his puppet and Kaidou wandered up to him through the woods. Kaidou opened his mouth to say something but Inui motioned him to be quiet. The puppeted spider, Sobek, roughly deposited Kaidou into the back seat of the jeep. Inui leapt down after him, and after giving Kaidou a quick once over and a comforting pat, he reached down and plucked something from Kaidou’s belt, though Kaidou was too distracted to see exactly what it was. 

Kaidou was still in awe of the things that Inui could do now, with his new systems. Admittedly, it made his job as a spider buster harder, but he remembered the days when spiders left their bodies to become defenseless husks when their minds so much as touched any computer system. Now, Inui was seamlessly—or at least so it appeared—piloting two bodies. 

He grabbed Sobek and whipped him around when his body wobbled as Inui released control of him. 

“Pi?” was all Sobek was able to rasp before Inui tapped a jammer into his neck-port, a classic spider-busting tool that he had clearly taken off Kaidou. It wouldn’t kill him, but it certainly incapacitated him, as Inui let him fall to the ground. 

“He let me puppet him, but with him still conscious, it was leaving their security systems locked out.” Inui turned back to look at Kaidou. “I’ll say this, he certainly named himself well, after a god of military prowess that wards against evil.” 

“You’re saying we’re evil?” Kaidou’s voice never wavered from a monotone, especially through his grimace as he held his wound, but he knew Inui could tell it was a joke. 

Inui helped him farther into the backseat of the vehicle. “Get settled. We’re getting out.” 

To Kaidou’s shock, the vehicle started moving as soon as the door was closed behind him. “Wait… Inui!” 

Inui had opted to cling to the side of the vehicle, clutching the roll bars and watching behind them as he commanded the vehicle to fly forward. With a glance back, he saw why. The compounds drones and defenses were lighting up and giving chase. 

With his artificial eyes glowing a brighter white than his glasses could contain, Inui locked into to each one through sheer will, and all the defense systems turned in on themselves. Drones and turrets destroyed each other in a brilliant flash of munitions. 

That—and the triumphant smirk on Inui’s face with the rush of wind and explosions playing at his hair—was the last thing Kaidou saw before his vision blurred and he fell unconscious on the backseat.  
  


* * *

  
Inui was quite certain that adrenaline had fueled him for most of their retreat. After ensuring that he could see no more drones or cars pursuing them, and couldn’t sense any wirelessly connected devices in their vicinity, he had climbed back in the car to tend to Kaidou. There was little he could do in a moving vehicle except try to comfort him as much as possible. He had torn half his clothing to ribbons to try to stem the bleeding. 

In between bouts of fitful unconsciousness, Kaidou had managed to give him the coordinates of the new, mysterious safehouse he had in mind. Inui got him safely inside and tried to make a comfortable spot for him, before scoping the layout. It was much smaller than Kaidou’s cabin in the woods but it would function for their purposes, Inui decided. 

Inui came back to Kaidou, who was still laying just as he had left him in front of the roaring fire in the safehouse’s fireplace. Inui looked him over for a bit, trying to decide if he was really paler than he had been the last time Inui looked at him, or if that was just his imagination. Kaidou looked up, and gave him the barest of grins. “Are you holding up?” 

Inui completely ignored the question—feeling that it was ludicrous of him to ask about Inui’s state of mind when he was the one bleeding—and instead opted to pull up Kaidou’s shirt to get down to the business of tending to him. Kaidou was still applying pressure to the wound, and Inui swept his hand away as well, pulling back the impromptu cloth bandages that were beginning to stick now. Kaidou winced, but refused to cry out. 

“I found the kit in the closet right where you said it would be,” Inui said, reaching for conversation topics. He remembered vaguely that keeping people distracted while performing field medicine was generally recommended. 

Kaidou nodded. “I’m ready.” 

Inui frowned. They didn’t have much in the way of painkillers. He knew if he brought that up, Kaidou would just brush it away, claiming he didn’t need them anyway. And Inui knew logically that the wound needed to be treated, with or without painkillers, but… 

He snapped open the kit, finding the sterile latex gloves. “It would be so much easier if you were a spider.” 

Kaidou gave him a skeptical look. 

“We can deaden our nerves on command,” Inui explained, as he dug through the kit, organizing the tools so he could grab them quickly. “Now, anyway.” 

Kaidou opened his mouth to say something, but whatever it was got cut off with a hiss as Inui began wiping the wound with disinfectant. Inui didn’t bother apologizing; they both knew it was necessary. “My job revolves around not being modded like that,” Kaidou said, his voice a bit rough. 

Inui hummed at that. He picked up the surgical tongs, and started analyzing the wound. At the very least, his mods did let him do quite a bit of guesswork, rather than exploratory poking. His eyes began mapping the entry point, calculating angle, extrapolating from the size of the wound what caliber the bullet was, and therefore what had most likely fired it and with what force, to come out the most likely placement. All that in mind, he spread open the entry wound with two fingers. 

“I know,” Inui said. “It would just be much more convenient, knowing that the cure isn’t causing the patient pain.” As he spoke, he inserted the surgical tongs, following the path, and grasping with them when he was about at the depth that his calculations had shown as the most likely resting place. Of course, there were many variables that could not be accounted for with such limited information, and though the calculations had shown this path to have 65% likelihood, he still had to fish around a bit. 

Kaidou was managing to remain shockingly still, though his hands balled into fists in the blankets that he was laid out on, and he was clearly clenching his jaw. “I hope you’re not suggesting that you’d rather you took the bullet than me.” 

Inui went a bit silent at that. He finally found the bullet and tried to pull it out with the least amount of pain that he could. He set the bullet and tongs aside, reaching for the suture. “Luckily the bullet doesn’t appear to have pierced any organs.” 

“You didn’t answer my question,” Kaidou hissed. 

Inui turned back to the wound, trying to hold the sides of it together, but he finally had to acknowledge the subtle shake in his hands. “You’re better at sewing than I am, at least,” he said, not quite in answer. 

The fact was, he would have prefered to take a bullet rather than let Kaidou take one any day. In addition to the fact that his body could allow him to cut off the pain and handle the wound, Kaidou would have been much more effective a caretaker. 

Kaidou grabbed his wrist, surprising Inui so much that he almost dropped the suture. “Don’t you dare think you’d be better off taking a bullet for me! Don’t you dare.”

Inui furrowed his brow. “I…” 

Kaidou glared at him. 

“It’s hard not to consider it as a matter of efficiencies…”

“Don’t…” 

Inui looked over his face. He was still grimacing in pain, sweating slightly, and glaring. But there was more than just anger in his face. Inui wasn’t good with emotions, but he was certain there was something akin to concern there. 

Which was ludicrous, given which one of them had just been shot. 

Inui nodded all the same. “Alright. I will drop the thought immediately.”

Kaidou let go of him, letting his hand fall to the floor. 

Inui finished the stitches, feeling as if his hand was steadier, but it was a near thing.  
  


* * *

  
Kaidou awoke to the sun in his eyes. He blinked, and tried to raise his arm to cover his eyes, only to feel a twinge of pain from his side. Thankfully, the blinds were shuttered without Kaidou having to do anything. 

“Good morning,” Inui said, standing between him and the window. “I was going to make breakfast, however…” He shuffled flat plastic pouches in his hands, staring at them dubiously. “Ration packs seem to be all we have here, and I don’t think the stove works.”

“It’s a gas range,” Kaidou said. 

Inui looked up, his dubious expression redirecting itself entirely at Kaidou. “It’s a _what_?”

Kaidou chuckled, only to feel his stitches pull, and groaned instead. 

Inui kneeled down next to him, resting an arm gently on the cot. “How do you feel?”

“Fine.”

He looked over to see Inui glaring. 

“Good enough,” he amended. “Thank you.”

Inui set the ration packs to the side, grabbing Kaidou’s hand. “I’m glad you’re alright. We just need to lay low for a while, before we can go back to base. Hopefully they’ll stop looking for us soon.” 

Kaidou gripped his hand tighter. 

“I could probably go out undetected,” Inui continued. “Get more food and supplies. I just don’t want to move you…” 

Kaidou shook his head. “We should be fine. There’s no need to risk going out.” 

“I beg to differ.” He was picking at Kaidou’s shirt, eyeing whether or not the bandage was soaked through yet. 

“I’ll be fine.” 

Inui shook his head. “But…” 

Kaidou gripped his hand harder. “I’ll be fine because I have you here.” 

Inui stared at him for a moment, before shaking his head and giving the barest of chuckles as he rested his head on the side of the cot. “Yes, but will you be fine with the food selection in the ration packs?” 

Kaidou untangled his hand from Inui’s to awkwardly grab the packs at the top of his cot, and help them over his head to read them. “I think MRE beef stew sounds perfectly fine.”

“Are you saying that because you trust it more than my cooking?” Inui asked, glasses glinting. 

Kaidou handed his chosen pack over to Inui, with just a ghost of a smirk on his face. “I would never say that while I’m confined to a cot and can’t move.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to check me out [on twitter](https://twitter.com/blue_mels) if you'd like more info on my fics.


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